Roy Keane isn’t angry, he’s just disappointed

详细摘要

A club Keane no longer recognises making decisions he never agreed with – it is little wonder he has gone from 'flabbergasted' to bored ...

Towards is usually two syllables, but Roy Keane laughs the word out in three.

“Ultimately, it’s still nowhere near good enough to try and get towards the middle of the table,” he says on Sky Sports, more “tuh-huh-wards” than towards.

Keane cannot believe the sentence coming out of his own mouth, and is laughing because Manchester United are in the relegation zone, where they have never been after 10 top-flight games since 1986 – seven years before he joined the club aged 21.

The bewilderment also comes from United having just conceded four goals at Old Trafford. In his 12-and-a-half years there up to 2005, not once did this happen. Not once, in any competition.

In 1994-95 alone, United shipped just four home goals across the entire Premier League campaign, while 4-4 was a scoreline Keane never witnessed at United.

Now, a club Keane no longer recognises. One of the worst insults for this current mess is that their greatest ever captain is no longer angry at what he is watching. He is just disappointed. “It’s almost getting boring now,” he said in response to presenter Mark Chapman stating this is “rinse and repeat”.

The cycle is something Keane cannot relate to either. The barmy draw against Aston Villa goes down as Michael Carrick’s last game in charge, with Mauricio Pochettino becoming their eighth permanent manager of the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era.

That is more coaches than Keane played club football under. For 15 years, all he knew was Brian Clough and then Fergie, while on international duty it was predominantly Jack Charlton then Mick McCarthy. All were no-nonsense managers embodied on the pitch by Keane, who in turn demanded nothing below 100 per cent from his teammates.

Keane took that to the dugout, but save for a Championship trophy with Sunderland, his approach was better served in the studio as huggers Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp arrived to embrace the new era of man-management.

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